Knowing that I have read many reports and books by the esteemed psychical researchers of yesteryear and have authored two books dealing with mediums, a friend recently asked me for my opinion as to the best medium ever, at least the best medium studied by the researchers. My friend apparently assumed it would be a matter of choosing between Leonora Piper, the famous Boston medium studied for more than two decades by the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and Gladys Osborne Leonard, the equally famous British medium of the early years of the 20th Century, also studied extensively by the English SPR. But, no, while those two rank in my top five, I opted for Henrietta “Etta” Wriedt (1859-1942) (below) of Detroit, Michigan as the best ever.

Wriedt was studied and validated by such esteemed researchers as Sir William Barrett, a physics professor who co-founded the SPR, Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist remembered for his pioneering work in electricity and radio, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the physician who created Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John S. King, a physician who founded the Canadian branch of the SPR, and Vice-Admiral William Usborne Moore, a retired British naval commander turned researcher. Lady (Dr.) Florence Barrett, Sir William’s wife, who was dean of the London School of Medicine for Women, is said to have been skeptical of all mediums until she sat with Mrs. Wriedt and heard from deceased relatives in their own voices.

Unlike Piper and Leonard, Wriedt was not a trance medium. In the trance voice type of mediumship, the spirits use the medium’s vocal cords, but in the direct voice, the spirits are said to use the medium’s ectoplasm to form an artificial larynx, allowing them to speak independent of the medium’s vocal cords. Thus, it is sometimes referred to as the “independent voice” type of mediumship and often involves a floating trumpet to amplify the voices. While skeptics claimed that direct voice mediums were expert ventriloquists, Wriedt was observed by researchers talking to people sitting next to her at the same time as spirit voices came through. It was reported that as many as four spirit voices would be talking simultaneously to different sitters and, although Wriedt knew only English, spirits communicated in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Arabic and other languages.

The best and most interesting accounts of Wriedt’s mediumship were reported by Admiral Moore in his two books, Glimpses of the Next State, published 100 years ago, in 1911, and recently reproduced by White Crow Books, and The Voices, published in 1913.

Moore, who had investigated a number of mediums in England before sailing to the United States, first visited Wriedt in Detroit in 1909 and then again in 1910 and 1911. He arranged for her to visit England in 1912. Moore (below) noted that the spirit voices came through in broad daylight or gaslight, but they were louder in the dark. Moreover, Wriedt was open to sitting anywhere in the room so that the investigator could watch her and rule out fraud.

Wriedt’s primary spirit control was Dr. John Sharp, who was born in Glasgow during the 18th Century, but was taken to the United States as an infant and died in Evansville, Indiana. “Dr. Sharp” sometimes spoke through the trumpet and at other times without the trumpet. He would usually open the séance in a loud, clear voice and then close it.

Moore further observed that Mrs. Wriedt spoke “Yankee,” yet the voices of his English relatives and friends came through in “pure English,” while discussing very personal and family matters. It is one thing for a ventriloquist to imitate a voice, quite another for the ventriloquist to bring through evidential information. Occasionally, phantom forms would appear. At a sitting on January 2, 1911, one such form appeared to be that of William E. Gladstone, former prime minister of England, who had died in 1898. “I could never identify any spirit by its face, but I could see that there were features,” Moore explained. “I very nearly recognized the face of Mr. Gladstone; his was a tall form, and remained some two minutes. After he had disappeared, he spoke through the trumpet. I need not say how surprised I was at this apparition and voice.”

Gladstone talked with Moore for about 20 minutes, discussing political matters in England, subjects of which Moore was reasonably certain that Mrs. Wriedt knew nothing of. Professor William James of Harvard, who had died the year before, also spoke and discussed an experiment that Professor James Hyslop was to undertake in a few days. Moore also heard from Sir Richard Burton, but then something strange happened. He heard from a friend in England, who was still alive. He concluded that it was 2 a.m. in England and that she was traveling out-of-body during sleep.

Moore recorded the first hand account of Count Chedo Miyatovich, a diplomat from Serbia, who sat with Mrs. Wriedt on May 16, 1912 in England. He was accompanied by his friend, Dr. Hinkovitch. Wriedt began by telling Miyatovich that a young woman, a spirit friend of his, stood in front of them and wondered if he could see her. “I did not,” Miyatovich wrote his account of the sitting for Moore, “but my friend saw an oblong piece of illuminated mist.”

Mrs. Wriedt then said that the woman whispered to her that her name was Adela or Ada Mayell. “I was astounded,” Miyatovich continued. “Only three weeks before died Miss Ada Mayell, a very dear friend of mine, to whom I was deeply attached. The next moment a light appeared behind Mrs. Wriedt and moved from left to right. There in that slowly moving light was, not the spirit, but the very person of my friend William T. Stead (a victim of the Titanic disaster a month earlier), not wrapped in white, but in his usual walking costume. Both I and Mrs. Wriedt exclaimed loudly for joy. Hinkovitch, who knew Stead only from photos, said: ‘Yes, that is Mr. Stead.’ Mr. Stead nodded to me and disappeared. Half-a-minute later he appeared again, looking at me and bowing; again he appeared, and was seen by all three of us more clearly than before. Then we all three distinctly heard these words: ‘Yes, I am Stead. William T. Stead. My dear friend, Miyatovich, I came here expressly to give you fresh proof that there is life after death. You always hesitated to accept that truth.’”

After Stead disappeared, Ada Mayell began speaking. “She then spoke to me in her affectionate and generous manner, trying to reassure me on certain questions which had sadly preoccupied my mind since her death,” Miyatovich continued, further mentioning that she referred to letters sent to him by her sisters and niece. “Mrs. Wriedt and Hinkovitch heard every word. Then, to my own and my Croatian friend’s astonishment, a loud voice began to talk to him in the Croatian language. It was an old friend, a physician by profession, who died suddenly from heart disease. They continued for some time the conversation in their native tongue, of which I heard and understood every word. Mrs. Wriedt, for the first time in her life, heard how the Croatian language sounds. I and my Croatian friend were deeply impressed by what we witnessed that day, May 16th. I spoke of it to my friends as the most wonderful experience of my life.”

Miyatovich then arranged for Professor Margarette Selenka, a friend of Stead’s who happened to be in London at the time, to sit with Mrs. Wriedt on May 24. He accompanied her, while two others were present. “After a short time from the beginning of the séance, we all saw Mr. Stead appear, but hardly for more than ten seconds,” Miyatovich recounted. “He disappeared, to reappear again somewhat more distinctly, but not so clearly as he appeared to me on May 16.” Stead then had a long conversation through the trumpet with Selenka and a short one with Miyatovich, reminding him of an incident two years earlier in his office at Mowbray House. Then, Ada Mayell again spoke, followed by Miyatovich’s mother, who spoke in her own Serbian language. Selenka then heard from her deceased husband, Professor Lorentz Selenka, and her mother, who died a year earlier, both speaking in German. A friend of Selenka’s came singing a German song, and asked her to join him, as they used to sing together in the old days, after which a number of spirits came for the other two sitters.

Sir William Barrett set forth his testimonial in Moore’s book. “I went to Mrs. Wriedt’s séances in a somewhat skeptical spirit, but I came to the conclusion that she is a genuine and remarkable medium, and has given abundant proof to others beside myself that the voices and the contents of the messages given are wholly beyond the range of trickery or collusion,” Barrett offered.

The Rev. Charles Tweedale told of his sitting with Mrs. Wriedt on June 3, 1912. “We had a marvelous experience,” he wrote. “The sitting commenced with our singing ‘Lead Kindly Light,’ then a deep and solemn voice, which we were informed was that of Cardinal Newman, gave me his benediction, and water was sprinkled over us. Now ensued a marvelously evidential series of happening which most profoundly impressed and convinced Mr. W. W. Baggally, one of the chief investigators for the Society for Psychical Research, who was present and which dealt with intimately private affairs concerning his deceased father and fiancée. During the course of this wonderful experience a voice announced itself as Frank Woodward and enquired for my wife, and spoke to her. This astounded her, for Frank Woodward was her former music master, of whom she had not heard for seventeen years, and who lived in the extreme north of England. Enquiry afterwards revealed the fact that he had died a year previously.”

Moore recorded that there were days when no phenomenon occurred with Wriedt. He blamed fatigue on her part, lack of harmony within the sitting circle, and also adverse weather conditions, but he concluded that he had never met anyone whose mediumship had brought him so close to the next state as Mrs. Wriedt.

Not all Christian clergymen believe that messages coming to us through modern mediums are the work of the devil. The Rev. Michael Cocks, an Anglican priest from Christchurch, New Zealand, is among the more open-minded clergyman.

During the 1970s, Cocks was one of a small group of religious friends who began gathering periodically at the modest home of Thomas and Olive Ashman in Christchurch to observe the trance mediumship of Thomas Ashman. After Ashman went into a trance, an entity calling himself “Stephen” began talking through him. This was not any old Stephen, but Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

Stephen would dialogue with the group, which, in addition to Cocks and Ashman’s wife, Olive, also included a liberal Catholic priest, a Buddhist, and other curious observers. Cocks states that normally Stephen spoke through Ashman in a “rather curious English,” but that he twice spoke in an ancient Greek dialect, which apparently was for the purposes of confirming his identity.

“For myself, I do not speak [English] and I never have,” Stephen related in one of the sittings. “I activate these words that are in Thomas’s memory and are known to him. Occasionally there is a little ‘magic,’ when I join together sounds and symbols that are in Thomas’s mind so that words may be spoken that are not known to Thomas.”

At one sitting, Stephen said: “Think not that when you are without your body, you are going to be much different, for your needs are different. Except through feelings there is little association, for your tasks and your needs are no longer what they were, and the tasks and needs of them that are still in the body are different. These are the first things you learn.”

On another occasion, he was asked about reincarnation and said: “The answer is most difficult. The understanding of the phenomenon is sometimes beyond even myself, but hear me now. Even as I speak through this body, I am Stephen and reincarnate possibly a thousandfold. The confusion is not in the reality of this. It is on the concept of your conscious mind where it can but think of one body.”

Stephen was not the only communicator. On October 23, 1973, these words, apparently coming from Christ, flowed from Ashman’s vocal cords: “The task of your servant Stephen is that of messenger and he speaks with great authority. The task of yourselves is the decision as to which way you choose use those messages…”

Christ spoke through Ashman on several other occasions. “We believed it to be the voice of Christ, partly because Stephen agreed that it was, and partly from an awe-inspiring presence that had a very strong emotional and spiritual impact,” Cocks says. “The messages were of course very appropriate if they were from Christ.”

Cocks realizes that the story is difficult for most people to accept. At first, he had a hard time accepting it himself. Even after he came to believe that St. Stephen was actually communicating with the small group, he was reluctant to discuss it with many people outside of the group. “Part of it was fear of social ostracism for claiming to receive teachings from a saint,” he explains.

Cocks, who earned a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of New Zealand and a master’s in theology at Oxford University, wrote about his observations in a 2005 book titled “The Stephen Experience.” That book has now been revised, republished, and just recently released by White Crow Books as Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr. I recently put some questions to him by e-mail. Here are those questions and his responses:

Rev. Cocks, how did you become interested in mediumship?
“As a religious person I am primarily concerned with relationship to the God that is in all, through all, and above all. I have explored this relationship in many ways, through prayer, Bible study, reading the great mystics, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Evelyn Underhill, through consciousness studies, and through meditation. In all this I would include reading of great literature, listening to great music, and all of life’s experiences. When I was about 40 years old I had a burning desire to go deeper in my relationship with this God. While still acting as a priest, I joined a spiritual group called Subud, in order to free myself of previous conceptions of God, and encounter him afresh. After several months of participating in their spiritual exercises, I felt able to surrender to Christ at a deeper level, as a result of which I seemed able to receive guidance from Spirit in a new way. For example, on the very day I surrendered I attended a performance by a string quintet. While they played I found myself envying the abilities of each of the players, and scolded myself for it. By my envy I was spoiling a spiritual experience. When I returned home, I went to my study, where I received mental instructions to look for a book on the floor under one of the bookcases. I was to look up page 15. On this page was Thomas Gray’s Ode for Music, where it spoke of the folly of envying the musicians, thereby spoiling a spiritual experience. This clearly demonstrated an order of mind independent of my own head. From then on I experienced thousands of similar mind-blowing coincidences, and I was about to embark on a doctoral thesis on the phenomenon, when I received a book of prophecies about myself from a stranger in the North Island. I received these prophecies about the same day that Stephen the Martyr broke through the consciousness of Thomas Ashman.

“Shortly after that the Ashmans came from England to live in New Zealand. Three months later I met his wife, Olive, by chance. She invited me home to talk to Stephen as mediated by her husband. These conversations with Stephen continued between 1973 and 1980.”.

Isn’t mediumship frowned upon, even considered demonic, by the church you serve?
“Traditional churches like the Catholic, Episcopalian/Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and so on, are composed of people of all ages, all levels of education and spiritual development. These churches on the whole, even if they so wished, are not successful in controlling the private lives of their congregations, who if asked, would express a bewildering variety of often conflicting beliefs. In short, in the Anglican/Episcopalian churches you will find people who would accept mediumship, and other people who would think it suspect, or even demonic. In 1937, in the UK, there was published a report on Doctrine in the Church of England. Apparently in preparation for this report, there was a committee of eminent churchmen considering the question of mediumship. The majority were of the opinion that mediums were sometimes genuine, and that one could obtain valid information about spirit through them. A minority disagreed. The report was however shelved for fear of a backlash from conservative Anglicans.”

Would you mind describing the modus operandi of Ashman’s mediumship?
“It seems that Ashman was initially taken over involuntarily by Stephen. On many subsequent occasions, it was sufficient for Tom to pray for protection, and then to allow himself to go into trance. After a few minutes Stephen would seem to take over, greet us, and the conversations would begin. More often than not, Thomas would be unaware that anything had happened. At the end of a session, he would drowsily ask to be told what had happened. Often he had to wait a week, until transcriptions of Stephen’s words had been made available. On the occasions when Tom was semi conscious, he would interrupt Stephen to ask a question. In 1980 Stephen indicated that he had finished his teaching. I understand that after that Tom couldn’t function as a medium.”

Did you ever suspect Ashman of being a charlatan?
“Not really. He acted as a medium only for Stephen, and only for a small private group. He was obviously moved by what he was experiencing, and also changed by it. His hearers did have critical minds, and we often discussed whether what we were hearing came from Tom or from Stephen. The personality of Stephen was very different from that of Tom; what Stephen said sometimes contradicted what Tom believed. Stephen’s teaching was of a high order, and we frequently experienced striking and complicated synchronicities that gave us experience of what Stephen was describing in words.

“In my book, many pages are given over to discussing the meaning and implications of words of Stephen spoken in a little known version of Attic Greek of 2000 years ago. The implications were complex and needed elucidation through study of certain Dead Sea Scrolls, and through study of relevant scholarly works. Nearly everything that Stephen said, usually in English, but three times in Greek, was consistent with what we learned through scholarly studies. Ashman was intelligent, but certainly not a learned man. Taking what Stephen said in either language as a whole, we would conclude that it would be impossible for Ashman, or any living person, to have produced the material.”

Do you really believe that St. Stephen and Jesus communicated through Ashman?
“Yes I do really believe that we were hearing from St Stephen and Jesus. And I say this for the same reasons that I conclude that neither Tom nor any living person could have fabricated the evidence that Stephen supplied in his communications. In saying this we need to be familiar with what Stephen says about the relation between spirit and the physical. Such a familiarity would prompt us to nuance our affirmation with reference to the oneness of Spirit, and the corporateness of apprehension of truth. The constant synchronicities that we were experiencing in relationship to the teaching of Stephen demand such nuancing.”

Why did you wait so long to write the book?
“We were trying to write such a book while our conversations with Stephen were continuing. And there have been subsequent attempts. The problem was to get the material into a form that readers could follow, and in a form that a publisher would be prepared to print. I was also fearful of my fellow clergy, imagining their reactions to my producing such a book. In 2001 an open-minded skeptic was impressed by the scholarship of my book, and offered to publish it.

Three hundred copies were sold of that edition. Now White Crow is publishing a much more readable version, thanks to many discussions with the publisher, Jon Beecher, and my philosopher son, Richard Cocks.”

How have your fellow clergymen reacted to your book?
“In fact a number of clergy have been supportive, both with regard to my book, and also to my journal The Ground of Faith, where Spirit is considered from the point of view of experience, and of science.”

When it comes to a belief in psychic phenomena (“psi”) and in life after death, there are believers, non-believers, and what might be called quasi-believers. The latter group accepts the existence of psychic phenomena, but they, for the most part, remain skeptical on the life after death issue and resist the idea that spirits of the dead can communicate through humans. They believe in what is called Super-psi or Super ESP. When it comes to mediumship, the quasi-believers seem to see it as the subconscious of the individual interacting with some cosmic computer while pretending to be the spirit of a “dead” person. Many parapsychologists favor Super-psi over the survival (of consciousness) hypothesis, viewing it as an “either/or” situation.

Dr. James E. Beichler, (below) a retired physics professor and author of To Die For, doesn’t believe that there is a conflict between Super-psi and Survival. “To me, it is not an issue because the source for Super-psi is the same as that thing that survives material death – the mind/consciousness complex,” Beichler explains. “While we are in our material bodies before death, our consciousness (through what we normally call intuition) acts as the source for our sixth sense and mediates between our mind/brain and the rest of the space-time cosmos, including other consciousnesses. This is the physical source of Super-psi. However, when we die the physical but non-material mind/consciousness complex survives and consciousness continues to act as a sensory mediator between physical space-time and our minds.”

From the parapsychological point of view, there are, Beichler says, three possible explanations for mediumship: 1) the medium is really passing on information from the spirit of a dead person; 2) the medium is telepathically getting the information from the deceased person before he died, using retrocognition; 3) the medium is telepathically tapping into the mind of some living person who has intimate knowledge of the dead person being channeled. Numbers two and three have been lumped together and called Super-psi.

Super-psi is nothing new. Although they didn’t call it by that name, the pioneers of psychical research recognized similar explanations. Initially, they wrote it all off as telepathy – a “secondary personality” in the subconscious of the medium being able to read the minds of the sitters. When information came through unknown to the sitters, the pioneers speculated that the medium could tap into the minds of anyone in the world. They called that teloteropathy. When that didn’t completely explain it, they further speculated that there is some kind of “cosmic reservoir” into which the medium’s subconscious could access information. Accepting it as spirit communication would have been much too “unscientific” in that early era of scientific materialism when “intelligent” men and women were trying to put religious superstition behind them. However, most of the pioneers came to accept the spirit hypothesis, which was totally consistent with the survival hypothesis. It was one thing, they reasoned, for the medium’s secondary personality to access information from minds around the world or from some cosmic computer, but quite another for the information coming from the alleged spirits to actually dialogue with the sitters. There was too much personality and too much volition to dismiss it as anything other than spirit communication. Moreover, the researchers could see no logical reason why the subconscious of so many mediums would pretend to be spirits of the dead.

As Beichler sees it, there is a more complex electromagnetic level of existence than that recognized by parapsychology or mainstream physics. “This complex electrical structure or pattern corresponds to a living organism and is essentially the mind of that organism, while the corresponding complex magnet pattern that accompanies the mind pattern is consciousness,” he explains. “Our matter/energy bodies, which include our brains, sense the external three dimensional world of matter and energy that we know from our experiences through our normal fives senses. However, our consciousness exists four-dimensionally in that it occupies all four dimensions of space while the matter/energy and electric portions of our organisms only occupy three dimensions. So our consciousness, even while we are living, can sense the external world of matter/energy outside of our normal five senses as well as anything else within all four dimensions of space, such as other consciousness.”

I told Beichler that I thought it was a very convoluted subject and one on which most people might struggle to wrap their brains around. “The term convoluted is absolutely correct and to the point,” he responded, “but then if I would give snappy one or two sentence explanations no one would understand. The journey is convoluted, but the goal is simple and straightforward. However, it’s always about the journey and never the goal or so says everyone having anything to do with enlightenment. Yes, four-dimensional spaces and five-dimensional space-times are difficult to comprehend and would be dismissed outright if they didn’t have such a rich history. Without that history (the journey), any person who suggested such a radical notion would be thrown in a loony bin. People were burned at the stake for making far less radical comments just a few hundred years ago, but then so were people who claimed to read minds, tell the future and survive death. Even today, they are minimalized within the scientific/academic community, which in the end isn’t much different from being burned at the stake.”

The bottom line here is that, Super-psi or not, consciousness does survive death, and that is the key message of Beichler’s book. “Science should soon be able to confirm this fact to some extent,” Beichler continues. “Or at least viable scientific theories on survival are now beginning to emerge. I wrote the book to inform people of our continuing existence after bodily death in the hope that it would help some to ‘evolve’ more easily to the next step in human existence and evolution – the afterlife. The second message is that religions and various other metaphysical disciplines have gotten part of the message correct, but have also garbled the message to some extent for political purposes.”

Many spirit messages suggest that failure to grasp the fact that we live on after death can result in an “earthbound” condition. “If the mind had no memories or even the slightest idea of its five-dimension existence during life, such that the person had attained only the minimum level of consciousness before death, the surviving mind might not accept its new reality and continue expecting input from the brain and the four-dimensional world,” is how Beichler explains it in his book. “Under these circumstances, the mind might be stuck in its four-dimensional reality even though it is materially cut off from that reality, and not realize that the body is dead. Or the mind might not accept the death of its host body and experience a total blackness or ‘nothingness’.”

In his discussion of near-death experiences (NDEs), Beichler further comments on the need to become “conscious” of survival in this lifetime rather than assume that there is no consciousness after death or assume that we will become suddenly enlightened in the next world. He points out that not all people who report NDEs have a life review. “This review is neither an absolute nor even a necessary event since some people have a greater experience with the five-dimensional extension of physical reality before they die and thus their minds do not need the orientation provided upon death through a past-life review,” he explains. “Others may not be advanced enough in their own personal paths of conscious evolution to warrant the past-life review, and still others may not mentally accept what has happened (they deny their death) and thus ‘sense’ nothing at all. In other words, people’s minds seize upon the most familiar surroundings when they enter the new environment of the five-dimensional universe, but can still reject the experience completely, depending upon their mind set and mental priorities at the time of death.”

I asked Beichler if he sees any change in the attitude of mainstream science toward the paranormal. “Yes, a few more people in science are taking the paranormal more seriously,” he replied, “but only a few. I think that there is also a huge ‘silent majority’ that has nothing against including the paranormal in science, but being silent and ‘passive’ they don’t help the situation very much. It’s funny but modern physics actually implies the paranormal. In quantum theory they say something like ‘consciousness collapses the wave packet’ to create our commonly perceived material reality. It is also commonly known that different parts of out material reality are ‘entangled’ together, meaning that what we do at one time and place immediately affects what happens elsewhere with no signal or knowledge of the original event ‘causing’ the corresponding event elsewhere to occur. If you put those two ideas together, modern quantum theory strongly implies that consciousness can collapse the ‘wave packet’ elsewhere in the universe, which is as good a definition of the paranormal as anyone has ever developed.”

Beichler has been writing about and giving presentations on the development of a new “Third Scientific Revolution” for a number of years now, but he says that it is slow in unfolding. “The new revolution will give mind and consciousness equal billing with physics and the other sciences,” he states. “Many distinctions between mind and matter in the Cartesian sense of the categories will just evaporate. Science will become subjective and objective rather than just objective. To a historian of science, such as myself, the past few decades of scientific accomplishments and events look a lot like a replay of the scientific changes and events that occurred in the final decades of the nineteenth century, just prior to the “Second Scientific Revolution.” It is just awaiting the acceptance of a new theoretical leap forward before it becomes apparent to everyone, and I am working toward that goal.”

We have been animals by Pierre-Emile Cornillier – Reine sleeps easily, grows cold from the very beginning of the passes, and then, to my surprise, returns to an almost normal temperature. Later on I learn that Vettellini, finding her in bad health, has arrested the chilling of the body. Read here